To Autumn - Poems | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization. browse poems & poets sign up to receive a new poem-a-day in your inbox sign up Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge occasions read this poet's poems English Romantic poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when Keats was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother's death, Keats's maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians.

Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When Keats was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 Keats became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry. Around this time, Keats met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner, who published his sonnets "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and "O Solitude." Hunt also introduced Keats to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth . The group's influence enabled Keats to see his first volume, Poems by John Keats, published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of Keats, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year.

Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt's literary circle "the Cockney school of poetry," Blackwood's declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats's genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews. Keats spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, Keats met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, Keats mainly worked on "Hyperion," a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth.

He stopped writing "Hyperion" upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as "The Fall of Hyperion" (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn Keats contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his "posthumous existence." In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished "Hyperion," and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "Ode to a Nightingale." The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion.

The fragment "Hyperion" was considered by Keats's contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor's orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery. Selected Bibliography The Poems of John Keats (1978) The Poems of John Keats (1970) The Poems of John Keats (1970) Collections: The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats (1831) Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St.

Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) Poems (1817) Letters of John Keats: A New Selection (1970) The Letters of John Keats (1958) Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848) Drama Otho The Great: A Dramatic Fragment (1819) King Stephen: A Dramatic Fragment (1819) Poem of the week: To Autumn by John Keats | Books | The Guardian Carol Rumens's poem of the week Poem of the week: To Autumn by John Keats Marked by sensuous profusion and artistic control, this most widely published of English poems is laden with meaning The soft-dying day … vines in autumn. Photograph: Alamy Share on Messenger Close It is, apparently, the most anthologised English poem. And if critical essays were apples, and the poem a tree, John Keats's ode, "To Autumn", would have toppled by now under the mass of its exegetical fruit.

As a fellow poet's lovingly intimate close reading, Seamus Heaney's Keats essay in his 1980 collection Preoccupations can't be bettered. But the more recent "it's not just about autumn" school has produced stimulating analysis – from Tom Paulin's high wire revisionist act in deciphering a call to armed revolution to a persuasive investigation of local politics and topology by the authors of a recent Review of English Studies article. Are there any unanswered questions left? Like many readers, I've always linked the poem's story of rich fruition with Keats's superlatively productive "learning curve" in 1819, and puzzled no further. But then a belated reading of Helen Vendler's essay in The Odes of John Keats (1983) stopped me short. Vendler asserts that Autumn is a goddess, a Ceres with a touch of Milton's Eve and Spenser's Autumn. I'd always imagined him as male, so my first and primary question concerns identity: whom does Keats want us to see when he leads us into the grain store of the second stanza? God or goddess?

Divinity, homespun allegorical figure, or weary agricultural labourer for Winchester's corn-farming "new rich"? All of Keats's Odes abound in mythical beings. There are the three urn-figures of " Indolence " (Love, Ambition and Poesie), the eponymous " Psyche " and " Melancholy ", the " light-winged Dryad " of "Nightingale", and the "marble men and maidens" in " Grecian Urn ". Like Ambition and Poesie, the addressee of "To Autumn" may be allegorical, Keats taking his cues not only from Spenser's " Mutabilitie " cantos, but from Chatterton's " Ælla: A Tragicall Interlude ", both of which feature a male Autumn. A character "oft" seen at rest on the granary floor, or dozing on a furrow when he should be working, Autumn initially resembles neither a farm labourer nor a corn goddess. But if not a corn goddess, what about a wine god? A Bacchus-like being in hangover mode, or even Bacchus, ie Dionysus , himself?

Keats's Greek influence during this period was mediated through sculpture – the Elgin marbles and, especially, the bas-relief which probably suggested the "Ode on a Grecian Urn". This decorates the Sosibios vase, which Keats himself traced from an illustration and depicts a Bacchic procession. So the god of drunken orgy and self-sacrifice may well have lingered in the poet's mind as he worked on the series of Odes. In fact, before repudiating "Bacchus and his pards", he lavished some particularly sensuous description on wine-drinking in "Nightingale". But Keats would also have been aware of the discussion in Plato's Phaedrus, in which Dionysus and Apollo are described as two of the four enablers of Divine Madness (interestingly, Poetry and Love are the other two). Originally a god of fruit and vegetation, Dionysus introduced the world to viniculture and presided over all things sappy, juicy and fecund. Such a god might aptly be termed the "close bosom friend of the maturing sun" – Apollo's fertility conspirator, no less.

The plants named in the first stanza – apple trees and vines – both supply fruit for alcohol. If the poem is to be trusted, cottagers in the 19th century trained their vines to climb along the eaves of their thatched roofs, presumably sheltering the fruit and exposing it to sunlight. Any grapes probably wouldn't have been suitable for wine, but they could certainly have been made into grape jelly and other "dainties". Those laden vines may simply be a fantasy of Dionysian drapery. If not – and I hope not – the symbolism still holds. The original Dionysus and Apollo are stepbrothers; brother-enemies, according to Rabelais. Dionysus is a raver, Apollo plays the lyre at concert-standard and bestows the gift of prophecy. One pours out words in spontaneous joy, the other intellectualises. In bringing Dionysus and Apollo together, Keats gives symbolic resolution to a personal, creative conflict. I'm not suggesting he was an alcoholic – poetry was his intoxicant.

But now the young enthusiast who wrote "O for a life of Sensation rather than of Thought", and told John Taylor that poetry should "come as naturally as Leaves to a tree" (an image perhaps recalling the wine-god's penchant for foliage), attains a point in his own "maturing" where sensuous profusion and artistic control find perfect balance. "To Autumn" becomes a parable of its own making. Those two faces of inspiration almost correspond to the two faces of autumn, a season that overlaps with both summer and winter. The first stanza ends with a Dionysian flow of inexhaustible abundance, with "more,/ And still more, later flowers for the bees" echoing the "More happy love! More happy, happy love!" of the "Grecian Urn". But now, Apollo warns, enough is enough. So in the last stanza, Keats forgoes rich fruit and honey-brimmed "clammy cells". The sun sets, the short-lived gnats wail, "the light wind lives or dies", the swallows prepare to migrate.

If the mood is valedictory, the writing maintains, even increases, its high charge as it replaces the ecstasy of semi-mythical harvest with a fine-tuned naturalism that fuses "beauty" and "truth". Even at the level of the rhyme scheme, there is an opening and closing, Romantic and Classical contrast. The 11 lines of each stanza begin with an ABAB-rhymed quatrain: the following sestet introduces a new pattern, with a run of three unrhymed words before the rhymes are picked up and symmetry is restored. Not all of Autumn's behaviour suggests Dionysus. That "patient look" at the "cyder press" doesn't belong to any divinity: it belongs to a real person, probably female, who brews cider. And although Dionysus sports a wreath of vine-leaves, and Spenser's Autumn a crown of corn, Keats's vignette of the gleaner crossing the book with "laden head" similarly suggests women's work and strictly non-Elysian fields.

My answer to the question "Who is Autumn?" is that "he" starts off as a drowsy Dionysus, but evolves toward the human and loses his fixed identity. The figure is a shapeshifter, a male divinity at first, but androgynous in mortal form. Keats knows him well. He doesn't even use the word "Ode" in his poem's title, and the opening line of the invocation is so low-key it might be mistaken for description: "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness …" Autumn is Keats's own Daemon. To Autumn Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twinéd flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barréd clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

To Autumn To Autumn To Autumn Introduction In A Nutshell John Keats was one of the greatest British Romantic poets, but he didn't have a long career like earlier generation Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge . "To Autumn," published in 1819, was one of the last poems that Keats ever wrote and, boy, what a note to go out on. Many readers count this short-and-sweet beauty as one of their favorites in the English language. It's normally grouped among the set of his poems known as the Great Odes, including " Ode on a Grecian Urn " and "Ode to a Nightingale." Keats had mixed feelings about his poetic career and often considered himself a failure. However, many critics think that if Keats hadn't caught tuberculosis and died at the age of 25, he would have gone on to write many more classics. As it were, Keats wrote "To Autumn" on September 19, 1819, at the height of his skill. He had just returned from a stroll near the town of Winchester in Hampshire, England. As he put it in a letter to his friend J.H.

Reynolds: How beautiful the season is now – How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather – Dian skies – I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now – Aye better than the chilly green of spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm – in the same way that some pictures look warm – this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it. As the letter suggests, the poem professes Keats's preference for autumn over spring, but the real star of "To Autumn" is the language and, more specifically, the sound. The influential American poet Allen Tate said that "To Autumn" is "a very nearly perfect piece of style but it has little to say" ( source ). Well, OK, we'll let that last dig slide. Yale Professor Harold Bloom calls it "as close to perfect as any shorter poem in the English language" ( source ). Labeling a poem as "perfect" or "flawless" has come to sound outdated to many readers: after all, we're talking about an artistic experience, not a gymnastics floor exercise. There are no perfect scores in poetry.

But the raptures that critics, poets, and readers have had over this poem should tell you something about what it has meant to a whole lot of different people. Why Should I Care? "To Autumn" is a poem for anyone who has a little trouble letting good things come to an end. It could be a relationship, a cherished experience, or just something you outgrow. And, of course, it could even be a favorite time of year. Before he set out to write this poem, John Keats surely knew that the hip thing to do would have been to write a poem in praise of spring, the season of life and rebirth. But despite their reputation for intense emotions, the British Romantic poets were not sentimentalists. They famously wrote odes in praise of things that most people wouldn't think to praise, like "Dejection" or "Melancholy." They found beauty in the neglected corners of life. In "To Autumn," Keats finds beauty in the lengthening days, chilly weather, and brown fields of fall, the time just before winter squelches the last bit of warmth and everyone retreats to their fires and hot cider. So what's the secret to letting a good thing end with grace and good humor?

First, always look forward, never back. When Keats thinks about the flowers of spring and summer, he's thinking about the seeds that are being dropped to bloom next year, and not what happened last year. Second, soak up every last bit of goodness at that moment without worrying about what comes next. The woman who personifies autumn in this poem spends her time napping in the fields and watching cider being made. She doesn't fret about winter. Finally, take a snapshot in your mind (or better yet, on paper), so you'll always have a powerful memory to return to. Each of the three stanzas of "To Autumn" is like a different Polaroid put into words, and filled with the light, smells, and sounds of the season. Sadly, Keats was to become a living example of things coming to an end too soon. He died at the age of 25, only two years after completing this poem. "To Autumn" This ode is a favorite with critics and poetry lovers alike.

Harold Bloom calls it "one of the subtlest and most beautiful of all Keats's odes, and as close to perfect as any shorter poem in the English Language." Allen Tate agrees that it "is a very nearly perfect piece of style"; however, he goes on to comment, "it has little to say." This ode deals with the some of the concerns presented in his other odes, but there are also significant differences. (1) There is no visionary dreamer or attempted flight from reality in this poem; in fact, there is no narrative voice or persona at all. The poem is grounded in the real world; the vivid, concrete imagery immerses the reader in the sights, feel, and sounds of autumn and its progression. (2) With its depiction of the progression of autumn, the poem is an unqualified celebration of process. (I am using the words process, flux, and change interchangeably in my discussion of Keats's poems.) Keats totally accepts the natural world, with its mixture of ripening, fulfillment, dying, and death. Each stanza integrates suggestions of its opposite or its predecessors, for they are inherent in autumn also.

Because this ode describes the process of fruition and decay in autumn, keep in mind the passage of time as you read it. Analysis Process or change is also suggested by the reference to Summer in line 11; the bees have been gathering and storing honey since summer. "Clammy" describes moisture; its unpleasant connotations are accepted as natural, without judgment. Certain sounds recur in the beginning lines--s, m, l. Find the words that contain these letters; read them aloud and listen. What is the effect of these sounds--harsh, explosive, or soft? How do they contribute to the effect of the stanza, if they do? The final point I wish to make about this stanza is subtle and sophisticated and will probably interest you only if you like grammar and enjoy studying English: The first stanza is punctuated as one sentence, and clearly it is one unit. It is not, however, a complete sentence; it has no verb. By omitting the verb, Keats focuses on the details of ripening. In the first two and a half lines, the sun and autumn conspire (suggesting a close working relationship and intention).

From lines 3 to 9, Keats constructs the details using parallelism; the details take the infinitive form (to plus a verb): "to load and bless," "To bend...and fill," "To swell...and plump," and "to set." In the last two lines, he uses a subordinate clause, also called a dependent clause (note the subordinating conjunction "until"); the subordinate or dependent clause is appropriate because the oversupply of honey is the result of--or dependent upon--the seemingly unending supply of flowers. Stanza II The ongoing ripening of stanza I, which if continued would become unbearable, has neared completion; this stanza slows down and contains almost no movement. Autumn, personified as a reaper or a harvester, crosses a brook and watches a cider press. Otherwise Autumn is listless and even falls asleep. Some work remains; the furrow is "half-reap'd," the winnowed hair refers to ripe grain still standing, and apple cider is still being pressed. However, the end of the cycle is near. The press is squeezing out "the last oozings." Find other words that indicate slowing down.

Notice that Keats describes a reaper who is not harvesting and who is not turning the press. Is the personification successful, that is, does nature become a person with a personality, or does nature remain an abstraction? Is there a sense of depletion, of things coming to an end? Does the slowing down of the process suggest a stopping, a dying or death? Does the personification of autumn as a reaper with a scythe suggest another kind of reaper--the Grim Reaper? Speak the last line of this stanza aloud, and listen to the pace (how quickly or slowly you say the words). Is Keats using the sound of words to reinforce and/or to parallel the meaning of the line? John Keats Wrote Ode "To Autumn" The New Nation (1790-1828) Henry David Thoreau, an American writer who wrote about the outdoors, had a hut here at Lake Walden, Massachusetts John Keats Wrote Ode "To Autumn" September 19, 1819 John Keats wrote several odes, which many people say are his greatest poetic achievements.

With the exception of "To Autumn" which he wrote in September, he wrote all the odes between March and June of 1819. During this time, he was struggling with a fatal illness as well as mourning the death of his brother. He also had an intense love affair with Fanny Brawne, who later became his fiancée. Sadly, John Keats died from tuberculosis at the age of 25 in 1821. Observation and description of the natural world were typical of the English Romantic movement (Romantic writing is characterized by an idealization of the past.) Poets John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had an influence on American writers such as Henry David Thoreau. Living on Walden Pond, Thoreau continued the tradition of Romantic poets in his journals describing his surroundings. page 2 of 2 To Autumn by John Keats | Poetry Foundation To Autumn by John Keats Writing Ideas 1. “To Autumn” is an ode—a celebratory address to a person, place or thing. Think of something commonplace that you experience everyday and write an ode commemorating some aspect or quality of it.

See Pablo Neruda’s “ Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market ” and Kevin Young’s “ Ode to the Midwest ” for other examples. 2. Personify a season and write a poem describing it. Think about what physical attributes your season might have, and what personality traits. How would it behave? 3. Keats allegedly wrote “To Autumn” after a particularly inspiring country walk. Try taking a notebook and going for your own walk out in a natural place. Pay attention to the sounds, sights, and smells around you and describe them in your poem. 4. Invent a rhyme scheme and write a poem that follows it for at least two stanzas. What is difficult about writing poetry that follows strict patterns? What is easy? 1. Keats uses personification —assigning human characteristics to inanimate objects—to create a portrait of a season. How is autumn characterized? What kind of person might autumn be? 2. What is the rhyme scheme of the poem? Does it follow any patterns that you recognize? Why might the rhyme scheme vary—and what effect does it have on you as a reader to have some rhymes close together and others far apart? 3. What kind of “music” does fall make?

What are the seasonal details Keats chooses to include and how do they color the emotional tone of the poem? 4. Look closely at the stanzas of “To Autumn”: how many sentences does each contain? What is the setting, or time period, of each? How do the three stanzas work together to show different aspects of autumn? Teaching Tips 1. After sharing a one or two sentence summary of the poem, have students work in small groups to paraphrase it. Beginning with the first two stanzas, which describe the poet’s personified “autumn” who conspires with the sun, sits “careless on a granary floor,” and “watches the last oozings,” have students put the list of what autumn does into their own words. Have them pay special attention to the speaker’s choice of verbs as they read. After these activities, have students consider the motive behind the speaker’s address to autumn in each stanza. 2. Have students paraphrase and then illustrate the first two stanzas before stopping to discuss the change that occurs in the third. Then have them paraphrase the poet’s description of autumn’s music in the last stanza before determining an illustration.

Ask, for example, how does autumn’s question, “where are the songs of spring?” change the speaker’s motive for talking in the last stanza? Ask, what might an illustration of this last stanza look like? Would a personified autumn appear in it? What are the similarities and the differences between this last stanza and the previous two that might make this illustration more challenging? Have small groups share their illustrations with classmates, explaining their choices. 3. Keats’s ode addresses the age-old and universal theme of the cycle of life, using the metaphor of the seasons to depict the human experience of growing to maturity and dying. In speaking of autumn, Keats explores the heightened awareness of one’s mortality that often comes in the midst of our most vital moments. Have students consider the speaker’s unique take on this revelation in the last stanza. How does the speaker depict the singular beauty of autumn’s music? After exploring the beautiful if haunting images, ask what commentary does he seem to make about autumn as the predecessor of winter? How does he use sensory images to capture the rare beauty of the season brimming with music that is unheard at other times of the year? What observations on the human experience might these images suggest?

To Autumn Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; ConspiringConspiring Working together; literally, to conspire is “to breathe together” (OED) with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-evesthatch-eves Thatch-eaves, the edge of thatched roofs run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowingwinnowing Separating the wheat from the chaff, the heavy from the light wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hookhook Scythe Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleanergleaner One who gathers the remaining food after the reaper has harvested the field thou dost keep Steady thy ladenladen Loaded down head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?Where are they? Rhetorical convention known as ubi sunt , often appearing in poems that meditate on the transitory nature of life and the inevitability of death.

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloombloom “to colour with a soft warm tint or glow” (OED) the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plainsstubble-plains Fields made up of stubble, the remaining stumps of grain left after reaping with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallowssallows Willow trees, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croftgarden-croft A croft is a small enclosed field; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. Discover this poem's context and related poetry, articles, and media. Poet By Caitlin Kimball Fall is in the air. So we are reminded here in the Northern Hemisphere, by the arrival of back-to-school catalogs and tiny inedible gourds littering the desks of teachers and bank tellers. No matter how far we are from our school days, fall retains the air of fresh beginnings.

And most of us are even further from our agricultural roots, making the weather a superficial consideration. It’s jacket time, and the streetlights snap on earlier. When John Keats walked the English countryside in the autumn of 1819, he witnessed day-by-day the glories—and grueling labor—of the harvest and its aftermath. In 1819 Keats was 23 years old and fully engrossed in the poetic vocation he had undertaken a few years before. Following some grim years as a surgeon’s apprentice, he had abandoned the medical profession and chose to pore over Shakespeare , Greek myths, and museum artifacts. Full of breathless appeals to heroes and muses, his early published verse helped feed the cliché of the moony Romantic: But what is higher beyond thought than thee? Fresher than berries of a mountain tree? More strange, more beautiful, more smooth, more regal, Than wings of swans, than doves, than dim-seen eagle? (from “Sleep and Poetry”) As florid as they were, his first compositions flaunt all the passion and musicality that he would refine into his most admired and enduring later work.

The fanciful turns of phrase seem to unreel so easily, line after line, that it can be hard to appreciate the unease that produced them. “I have been hovering for some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious and a love for Philosophy,” Keats wrote to his friend John Taylor in 1818. The scholar Walter Jackson Bate broadly diagnosed Keats’s problem as that of a house divided, his writing a struggle to unify sense and thought, the ideal and the real. By 1819, however, Keats was gaining confidence in a hunch he had articulated in a letter to his brothers two years before, which he called “ negative capability ”—a quality of imaginative open-mindedness in which “a sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” In an 1818 letter to his friend Richard Woodhouse, he imagined the role of the empathic, chameleon-like poet even more powerfully: As to the poetical Character itself . . .

it is not itself—it has no self—it iseverything and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. . . . Over the course of that summer in the country, as he composed the series of odes that would earn him his “greatness” well over a century after his death, you can almost trace the progress of this self-shedding to its realization in “To Autumn.” The poem is well-rounded in every sense—all five senses, to be exact. Visions of abundance and frantic industry yield to delicious indolence, and the poem’s luxuriously light touches, fragrances, and tastes culminate in a delicate but persistent chorus. The first stanza is a sensory glut, however mild and pretty “mists and mellow fruitfulness” may seem. The trees and vines that climb high and crawl low are full of mature fruit and nuts; the flowers keep blooming, the beehives are overflowing with honey. It has taken all summer to grow the sweetest, densest, most delectable portion of the harvest (try to imagine a rhapsody on midsummer’s snap peas and kale).

The end of summer is literally the fruition, the completion of a phenomenon of natural and manual labor. Sibilance (“mists,” “close bosom,” “bless,” “moss’d,” “swell,” “sweet,” “cease,” “cells”) and o-sounds, both long and short (“mellow,” “bosom,” “load,” “round,” “gourd,” “more,” “flowers”), help build this impression of combined pleasure and effort. Just as the mouth must work to voice a phrase such as “To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,” so is this harvest fantasia really a story of effort; the sun and season must “conspire” to “load and bless,” “bend,” “fill … to the core,” to “swell” and “plump” and “set” and “o’er-brim.” Nature has been hard at work. The stanza’s headiness and sensuality derives not just from gorgeous visions of fruit and flowers, but also from the outlay of energy, compressed into present-tense, monosyllabic verbs.

But it is summer, not autumn, that has “o’er brimm’d” the bees’ “clammy cells” (the honeycombs of their hives). Early autumn is really summer’s climax. If the sun is “maturing,” it will eventually fully mature, and then . . . what? Keats lends only the hyperproductive bees the burden of thought (“they think warm days will never cease”), setting this ode apart from his others (such as “ Ode on a Grecian Urn ,” “ Ode to a Nightingale ,” and “ Ode to Psyche ”), in which the poet’s own anxieties propel his subjects. In this final ode, the poet’s ego is absent, signaling his developing powers of negative capability. The poem isn’t a raw record of sensation, of course. It retains touches of formal rhetoric associated with the ode. “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?” the poet asks at the beginning of the second stanza, shifting his metaphoric imagination to see autumn as a harvester at rest. The spectacular labors of the first stanza are over; though the flowers live on and the fields are only “half-reap’d,” time has passed.

The slowing of time is sensual, though the pleasures are subtler when contrasted with the visual riot of the first stanza. The sounds of the second stanza are softer, too, all f’s and w’s: “hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind,” “half-reap’d furrow,” “fume,” “twined flowers.” The drowsy, gentle imagery betrays a dramatic compression of time: the reaper has already amassed a “store” in his granary, the wind winnows (the next step in preparing grain) its contents, and the lush growth has become overgrowth (“twined flowers”). Autumn is next conceived as a “gleaner,” a kind of harvest scavenger who painstakingly picks over what the scythe (the “hook”) has left behind. Finally, Autumn, as if it has all the time in the world, watches the cider ooze through the press, drop by drop. The apples that weighted the “moss’d cottage trees” have now ripened, fallen, and been crushed. The harvest is over.

Autumn, who conspired with the sun to put summer into overdrive, sending the bees into a frenzy of effort, is now under its own spell, “drows’d with the fume of poppies.” The third stanza breaks the spell momentarily for the reader as well, opening with more rhetorical posturing. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” The rhetorical questions, exhorting the reader not to think about spring, of course immediately bring to mind that tender season, now played out. Spring’s promise of growth and hopeful expenditure of energy, and summer’s overwhelming bounty, are done. It is the fate of any creation. In two of Keats’s odes composed just a few months before, he tries to reconcile the surrender of life’s beauty to death by affirming its endurance in art, myth, and memory. “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down,” he proclaims in “Ode to a Nightingale,” while the figures in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” are “For ever panting, and for ever young; / All breathing human passion far above. . .

.” But now Keats won’t leave the sensual realm for the visionary or philosophical, achieving the “fellowship with essence,” as he phrased it in his early long poem, Endymion, which we associate with the Romantic ideal (“I live not in myself, but I become / Portion of that around me,” wrote Keats’s contemporary Lord Byron in 1816). The poem’s last stanza offers a mild gesture toward “resolution” in an ever-unfolding present tense. It is early evening, and the emptied fields look warm under a pink-tinted sky. The images and sounds are specific, but the vision is comprehensive: down by the river, we hear the “wailful choir” of the gnats, while over on the hillside the lambs bleat. In the hedges the crickets sing, the robin harmonizes in the garden, and swallows twitter overhead. Keats indulges in the pathetic fallacy to strike the melancholy note (the gnats are mourning!), but as the song progresses the poet doesn’t project any further emotions onto the choristers; they bleat, trill, whistle, and twitter, as is their nature.

It is getting late, and the prospect of decay is everywhere, but its touch is light: “soft-dying day,” “bourne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.” It’s hard not to notice, after a few readings, that although the closing scene is imbued with a sense of mortality, autumn’s song sounds much like spring’s. After all, the birds and the lambs, although now “full-grown,” would have sung and bleated in May as well. The four distinct seasons, with all their sensuous variety, are one forward motion whose end is always death. We may rely on it, and must rely on it; the harvest is our means of surviving the cold that follows. Though Keats doesn’t make any overt attempt to reconcile autumn’s tragic nature, that his consciousness makes music of the creatures’ noises reminds us that this is a poetic creation. As much as the poet has absorbed his senses in an essence apart from himself, making no evaluations or claims for transcendence, he has taken pains to rescue and preserve the season whole—diminishment and all. Like the Greek figures on Keats’s urn, the scene is forever unfolding, round and perfect in its paradox of action and stasis.

It is always not yet winter. “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death,” Keats wrote to his would-be love, Fanny Brawne, that summer. He had watched his own brother die of tuberculosis just a few months before, and his medical training would have made clear to him the likelihood of his own fate. As he roamed the stubble-plains of Winchester in September, tubercular bacteria were already colonizing his lungs. A few months later, the illness worsened and his doctor advised him to curb his writing to preserve what was left of his vitality. That summer of 1819, the season of Keats’s flourishing that culminated in “To Autumn,” would be the poet’s own autumn. To Autumn

Question: Who wrote the poems "Hyperion"and"To Autumn"?
Answer: JOHN KEATS